


The Care and Keeping

by disco_vendetta (brinn)



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-11
Updated: 2012-09-11
Packaged: 2017-11-14 00:29:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/509395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brinn/pseuds/disco_vendetta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I was gonna mention it back by the drop point, but then there was the whole thing with people shooting at us and I couldn’t think of a good segue.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Care and Keeping

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://torigates.livejournal.com/327278.html?thread=7766638#t7766638) for [torigates](http://torigates.livejournal.com/)'s [All Hands On Deck Ficathon ](http://torigates.livejournal.com/327278.html#comments)

It happens in the jungle, because God and all his saints _really_ hate her damn guts apparently.  
  
She can recognize the signs early on - the cold sweats, the shaking, the vaguely asthmatic sounding breathing - but he just shakes his head when she raises her eyebrows as questioningly as she can around the vines that keep smacking her in the face.  
  
“Nothin’ for it,” he shouts over the sound of rotary blades catching up to them.  
  
He’s right of course. He’s going almost normal-person speed to avoid impaling himself on one of the pointer species of Amazonian tree, so they have a snowball’s chance in Bialya of getting enough of a lead on the robots to stop for a snack break. The robots in question are the metallic silver-blue of titanium and, aside from the giantass spinning _saws_ on the end of each arm, shaped a lot like horrible, mutant orangutans, if orangutans came from the realms of her deepest nightmares. (Somewhere, she knows, on the other side of the jungle, Conner is _pissed_.)  
  
It’s only when she sees the color suddenly drain out of his face that she barks “ _Maneuver Eighteen!_ ” and makes a sharp U-turn, runs back a few yards to where Wally’s dropped to his hands and knees and is bracing himself, and uses his back like a springboard to jump up and catch the pack of nightmare-orangutans in a big blob of fast-drying polymer whose design she blatantly stole from Roy because she knew she’d be better at using it than him because Roy sucks.  
  
“Okay,” she breathes, landing on one knee next to Wally and helping him get into a sitting position. “That should give us about five minutes before the other pack catches up to us. If you follow the riverbank we might be able to beat them to the village.” She takes a deep breath and braces for douchebag-impact. “You might have to carry me. You know, to get there in ti - why aren’t you doing your gross power-eating thing? Wally, five minutes was me being hopeful.”  
  
He gives her a wry sort of smile (which, _excuse him_ , Wally doesn’t do wry), and taps at his wrist. His emergency supply is completely gone.  
  
“I was gonna mention it back by the drop point, but then there was the whole thing with people shooting at us and I couldn’t think of a good segue.”  
  
“Wal _ly_ ,” she groans, rubbing her eyes with the base of her palms.  
  
“Yeah, I know,” he grins, “I’m the worst and the bane your existence. So listen, you go on ahead and meet up with Kaldur and the others, and I find a place to lie low around here. When the baddies are out of commission, you can find the Amazon equivalent of some Fruit Leather and come pick me up.”  
  
“Never gonna happen, idiot,” she gets out between teeth she’s gritting so hard her jaw hurts. “If those saw-monkeys find you, you won’t be able to get away, and you can barely fight your way out of a paper bag when you’re _not_ about to faint - “  
  
“Say ‘pass out,’” he interrupts, “‘Pass out is manlier. And they’re not monk - ”  
  
“ - Shut up, so I’m not leaving you here. We’re just gonna have to find you some food and meet up with the team later.”  
  
Wally’s constant internal struggle to look like a devil-may-care, laconic cowboy-type, and his deep-seated need to be lazy and fussed over and tenderly fed pastries while watching the Travel Channel is playing out across his face. She is two seconds away from punching him in the gut.

  
“Okay,” he finally agrees, voice soft, which is enough to send her into very quiet panic mode. His freckles are standing out garishly against his paper-white skin.  
  
She hauls him to his feet and half-drags, half-carries them to a protective tipi-ish cover of thick vines before dumping him on the ground.  
  
She presses her fingers hard against her temples, like that’s going to help, and squeezes her eyes shut. _Meg, we’re not gonna make the rendez-vous_ , she thinks as loudly as she can, trying to send a mental picture of Wally’s empty snack drawer. They’re almost out of range, but she gets a far-away feeling of _affirmative_ and figures they’ve got it covered. The targets were pretty short, as far as jungle-militiamen go.  
  
She keeps her eyes closed and squeezes the bridge of her nose for a second while she comes to terms with the inevitable. She gets halfway through one of those _Lord, give me the strength to accept the things I cannot change_ prayers before reaching out with one hand, wrenching a rock out of the ground, and pulling up a glistening, dirt-covered worm.  
  
She holds it out to him, grim-faced, and just says, “Protein is protein, West.”  
  
She’s all braced for some bitching in the nature and scale of Norse saga when Wally makes a resigned sort of noise, screws up his face, and swallows the whole thing down without chewing. She is equal parts delighted and on the verge of barfing directly on top of some very rare species of flower.  
  
He catches her open-mouth staring at him, and laughs slightly breathlessly, “What, you think the goggles were just to indulge my steampunk fantasies?” He tugs on them where they’re pushed up on his forehead. “Man, you do _not_ wanna know the amount of bugs I’ve accidentally swallowed in my life.” Sure enough, the goggles are coated with little bloody smears like a car windshield, and it’s all just so gross she wants to hit him, just on principle.  
  
“Alright,” he groans, pushing himself onto his hands and knees, “Let’s start making a pile - this could take a while.”  
  
She’s imagining all sorts of elaborate scenarios where she gets to jump up and down on his corpse as she makes a painstaking pile of worms, larvae, grubs, and a couple unknowns that are maybe a little poisonous, because she is a goddamn superhero and she’s kicked more terrorists in the face than Jack Bauer - she’s allowed to not like bugs. It takes the better part of two hours to get enough “protein” (as they are determinedly referring to it) for Wally to get back on his feet. Superspeed isn’t going to be an option today.  
  
They gather their horrible, awful, completely disgusting, _wriggling_ cache on a big, waxy leaf and spend a long moment just staring at it grimly.  
  
“You...might wanna look away for this part,” he mumbles, but his wheezing is getting really pronounced now, and while she doesn’t _think_ Wally is the kind of stupid that would pretend to eat a pile of bugs and throw them away when her back is turned, little-kid-and-broccoli-style, she’s not about to chance it in the middle of the freaking _jungle_ with saw-monsters and murderous Bolivians stalking them. She crosses her arms over her chest.  
  
He glares at her pathetically.  
  
“Fine, you wanna live with this mental image, be my guest.” After fifteen minutes, it’s impossible to tell which of them is more miserable or closer to being violently ill, but Wally stands up all on his own and if he’s still shaky, at least his breathing sounds more or less normal.

Half an hour of wandering through the underbrush later, Wally, predictably, runs smack into the elusive command center they’ve been searchingly lucklessly for for the past three day, bounces off, and smashes his face on a tree. A lot of Wally nerd-speak (muffled and guttural around his rapidly healing broken nose) and a few well-placed arrows make short work of it, and they leave a GPS tracker so the League can find it later and clean it up or strip it for parts or whatever. They make their way back towards the rendez-vouz point, taking it slow and easy, her hand ghosting against the small of Wally’s back in case he stumbles.  
  
There’s a large, smoking crater by the edge of the village that might as well have a giant, flashing sign that says SUPERBOY WAS HERE!, and six men with masks hog-tied to a tree, a pile of semi-automatics next to them. There are broken bits of robot-ape everywhere.  
  
They follow the sound of M’gann’s giggles until they find the others in the center of the circle of huts. The locals have apparently adopted them into their tribe, because each of their faces is covered in a precise pattern of white paint, and small horde of children is crawling all over Conner like his torso exists solely for playing My Side of the Mountain. Also, someone has put flowers in his hair.  
  
On the other side of the camp, Robin is apparently teaching the older children how to make small explosives out of local flora, and Kaldur appears to be trying to deprogram them just as quickly. His stoic voice of leadership is slightly marred by the baby he’s holding at arm’s length to keep it from sticking its fingers in his gills, and for a second Artemis is just so damn _fond_ of them all it makes her kind of sick.  
  
“Hey,” Wally says, catching her by the elbow and gently tugging her around to face him. “Thanks. For staying. You didn’t have to.”  
  
“I _did_ have to, moron. Do you seriously not get that yet?” Her stomach is churning uncomfortably, which she’s choosing to blame on a combination of hunger and being forced to watch Wally slurp down worms for two hours of her life she’ll never get back.  
  
“I get that.” His voice is that un-normal soft again, and he’s close, close in that way she never notices in the middle of a fight or in training, close enough to see the normal-ish palor of his skin, the faint, rust-red smear where he kept wiping his bloody nose with the back of hand, close enough to make out the forest-green ring around the edge of his irises. He wipes a smear of dirt off her cheekbone with his thumb, and she knows where this is going.  
  
“Uh-uh,” she snaps, catching his jaw in her hand and steering his face away from hers. “I know where that mouth’s been.” She turns on her heel and stalk over towards M’gann - the maternal glow coming off her almost blinding in its intensity, because _Conner and babies!_ \- but she listens for the sound of his feet following her. They do without missing a beat, and stay close.


End file.
